Starting and stopping VirtualBox from command line

Starting and stopping VirtualBox guests from the command line in Linux.

Firstly, we list the Virtual Machines with:

VBoxManage list vms

Or if we prefer, only running machiines;

VBoxManage list runningvms

If we want to stop the guest, we can do;

VBoxManage controlvm "name of VM" [option]
where option is pause, resume, reset, poweroff, savestate

Example, the following will poweroff FEC-A

VBoxManage controlvm "FEC-A" poweroff

To start a VM, we do;

VBoxManage startvm "name of VM" --type [option]
where option is gui, sdl, headless, separate

Example, the following will start FEC-A with a gui

VBoxManage startvm "FEC-A" --type gui

 
Note: leaderless seems to allow starting of the virtual machine when remotely logged in and allows it to keep running when logged out or connection is dropped.

See also here and here